He’s explaining why he’s going to vote to stick it to students and grads with heavy college loan burdens.

This is an expression of the “If you can’t pay for it out of pocket, you don’t get to have it” attitude that sounds like virtue, but it’s usually just a cover for “Don’t ask me to care about your problems” and “I got mine, you get yours.”

Basically it treats wanting good health care for your kids, a decent education, a secure retirement etc like expecting the government to buy you a sports car or send you on a trip to DisneyWorld.

The argument, as I understand it, is to graduates and current students facing decades of debt servitude, "You took out the loan, you need to be personally repsonsible for paying it off and not expect help the government to help you renege to even a small degree, and it doesn't matter if being personsally repsonsible means you don't get to buy a car, own a home, start a family, carry medical insurance, or, well, eat regularly. You should have thought of that when you decided to go to a college you really couldn't afford."

It's also saying to high school students looking ahead and wondering how they're going to pay for college and working parents wondering how they're going to earn enough to send their kids to school, "If you aren't prepared to accept the consequences, don't take out the loan. If you can't pay the tuition without the loan, find another school, go part time, or don't go at all! Give up any thought of improving your lot in life, accept you're one of life's losers, and get on with drudging your way to the grave or...do what I did! Work your way through."

And, again, this sounds like virtue talking, but it really boils down to, "Too bad for you. The country and the future belong to those who can pay the asking price whatever it is."

But at least Messer appears to have actually worked his way through college, unlike Paul Ryan who forgets his family is rich and thinks his little stint driving the Weinermobile makes him a working class hero.

Messer worked as a waiter and telemarketer to pay his way through school.

He has a claim on being a real self-made man, very much like the President. He just learned a different lesson from the experience.

The President learned he was lucky. Messer learned Luke Messer was a paragon of self-reliance.

The President learned people who work hard and do the right things can still need help.

Messer learned that if you need any help he didn’t need---or doesn’t remember having needed---it means you haven't worked as hard as he did, you didn't take personal responsibility, you're not pretty cool, so too bad for you.

By the way, it's one thing to be proud of what you accomplished. It's something else to know exactly what it was you did. Messer, who was born in 1969, graduated from Wabash College where the tuition is now about 34k a year. When he went there it was about 8k.

I'm giving Messer the benefit of the doubt here. In his bio on Wikipedia and in a few of the few articles about him I can find online, the story is that Messer and his siblings were raised by their "single" mother who worked for forty years at Delta Faucet. None of the stories say what she did at Delta, though. She might have worked on the factory floor or she might have been in upper management.

And there's no mention of her having been widowed or deserted, which suggests that there's an ex-husband somewhere in the picture and none of the stories say what what he did for a living or how much he contributed to the family's finances. In short, it's possible that Messer is the child of two well-paid members of the middle class who were able to give their children a lot of help along the way.

There's a big difference between working your way through college and working while you're in college to help pay your way. A lot of "self-made" types tend to forget how much help they got as they made their way, and politicians of both parties, although it seems especially Republicans these days, like to exaggerate their humble beginnings. It's a wonder they're able to stop short of claiming to have been born in log cabins. Mitt Romney considers himself a self-made man and sometimes even sounds like he thinks he was a hardship case. Paul Ryan notoriously used the money he got from Social Security after his father died to help pay for his tuition, which makes his desire to cut the safety net to ribbons one of the more egregious cases of ladder kicking in recent memory. Lost in the shouting though is that the Ryan family was rich, thanks to generations of government contracts awarded to their construction business, and the family came to his mother's aid after her husband died and Ryan himself still gets money from the business.

Messer doesn't appear to be the same type of hypocrite. It's probable that he received some form of financial aid, some of it based on his mother's situation, which means a way Messer took personal responsibilty was by having a father who didn't---he was lucky in being unlucky---and he might even have taken out a low-interest loan or two. Still, I'm taking it at face value that for all intents and purposes he did work his way through college. (I consider eaning academic scholarships a way of working your way through school. Which is the only way I can how he might have gone on from Wasbash to work his way through law school.) To the point, though, he did it more than 20 years ago under very different circumstances than the son or daughter of a single mother trying to earn the 34 grand to go to Wabash by waiting tables and sitting through the night at a call center today. Another way Messer was so coolly personally responsible was by choosing to go to college in the late 1980s when tuition was a lot cheaper, states and schools were more generous with aid, and student loans had yet to become a tool by which banks could gouge huge sums of money out of young people taking the personal responsibility of trying to get a good education that would lead to good a job and a future of more responsibility as citizens, homeowners, and breadwinners for a family---responsibilities a lot of young people are unable to take on these days because of crushing debt.

Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree they have a place in a well-organized universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing, of going around saying, “O great table, without whom we are as naught.” Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.---fromReaper Manby Terry Pratchett.

Coming along the sidewalk heading into town just below School Street, a man around seventy, a tall man around seventy, a very tall man around seventy, six and half feet, at least, wearing a yellow hooded slicker and a baseball cap. His rock salt gray sea captain’s beard reaches to his chest. He’s walking his dog, a full-sized blond poodle, shorn but not sculpted so looking like what poodles were bred to be, water dogs. The man---the captain---walks with his hands behind his back, the dog’s leash reaching looping out from behind with plenty of slack as the dog sticks close to the captain’s side. Both, man and dog, have quiet, placid demeanors, but seem to be in jolly moods. The dog’s smile is slightly wider than the man’s.

The red pickup parked next to us in the lot out front of the strip mall where the movie theater sports several rakes standing tines up from racks on the back of the cab and the side of the bed. There’s a shovel and green plastic trash barrel in the bed as well, and one more rake, bolted to the outside of the bed at a jaunty angle, like a flag. I think it’s decorative, a prop instead of sign advertising the lawn care business the owner of the truck must run. The fortysomething man behind the wheel looks like he’s been doing yard work. His face has a fresh burn over a tan. He’s wearing a faded t-shirt with a ragged collar and a ball cap that’s weathered and stained with dirt and sweat. He has three days or so of stubble, the unshaven look of someone who gets up and goes out too early and comes home too tired to shave most days and keeps a date with his razor for Sundays. He’s just sitting there with the windows open, obviously waiting for someone to come out of the mall. On the seat beside him is a paperback novel---Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen---that I expect he plans to get to if the someone he’s waiting for doesn’t return before he finishes the New Yorker article he’s reading at the moment.

This weekend is our 25th Wedding Anniversary and thanks to the generoisty of Uncle Merlin, Mom and Pop Mannion, and Old Mother Blonde and Old Father Blonde we're going to be celebrating by spending the weekend on Cape Cod. So this might seem like an odd moment to begin a fundraising drive.

"Hi! I'm on vacation. Please send me money!"

But the trip is a gift. And a short escape from our ongoing plumbing problems. When we get back we're having a fourth visit from a plumber, this one probably prepatory to having the sewer main replaced. Other bills are due and once again advertisers are being grudging about paying. Things will be tight for the rest of the August when I start teaching again. So, I'm asking, if you like what goes on around here and you can swing it, please consider making a donation. It's be a real help in getting over this hump and much appreciated.

Thanks to everyone who has donated in the past. Thanks to all of you for reading the blog!

Every now and then when I’m noodling around on Twitter, I like to pretend that politicians and elite journalists turning up in my feed care what I think and I’ll tweet at them as if I expect them to read what I tweet but really I do it for the fun of getting something off my chest.

So when Bill Keller published his op-ed piece in the Times the other day making the case that what Washington needs right now to calm folks down and clear matters up and make the city a place fit for heroes again is a return of Kenneth Starr, Keller got this in his Twitter feed from me.

@nytkeller where were you during the Impeachment crisis? Mars? Ken Starr was part of the problem, hardly a solution.

@nytkeller where were you during the Impeachment crisis? Mars? Ken Starr was part of the problem, hardly a solution.

It’s close to unbelievable that a journalist of Keller’s stature and experience remembering the Impeachment Crisis would remember Ken Starr as a paragon of probity, impartiality, and prosecutorial restraint.

Starr was a partisan hack who knew who his real bosses were (Jesse Helms, for one) and understood the job they’d hired him to do---run Bill Clinton out of the White House. Starr never intended to clear anything up or calm anybody down. His predecessor, Robert B. Fiske, had lost his job as independent counsel because he seemed to be in the process of finding that there wasn’t much that needed clearing up, there wasn’t any reason not to be calm, and impeachment wasn’t worth considering. Starr’s job was to keep the investigation going until he turned up something, anything the Republicans could use as an excuse to impeach Clinton. And he worked hard at that job, wasting millions of the taxpayers’ money, until, finally, having turned up nothing truly impeachable, he turned out---the Starr Report.

Which the American people met with almost universal disgust. And their disgust wasn’t with Bill Clinton. It was with Kenneth Starr who came across as a self-righteous and hypocritical old prude trying to excite everybody by describing in detail the sinful things he saw the neighbors doing while he was peeking in their bedroom window.

How did Keller miss this? Where was he?

Of course I know where he was.

Working for the newspaper that had spent the better part of the decade trying to make a story out Whitewater.

I also know that Keller is far from the only insider journalist who doesn’t remember the Impeachment Crisis the way most everybody saw it as it happened, a Republican attempt at a bloodless coup.

They still see it as something Bill Clinton brought upon himself and not something the Republicans inflicted upon the nation as they set out to overturn a Presidential election.

They still see it as something Bill Clinton got away with and not something the Republicans, fortunately, didn’t.

Maybe I’m missing something.

Maybe Keller’s just trolling all of us. Maybe his op-ed is a very subtle bit of satire, Keller reminding us how it backfired on the Republicans the last time they tried to overthrow a President. Maybe he’s being sneaky and trying to put the idea of Ken Starr in Republican heads so that they will disgrace themselves all over again.

Maybe Keller’s just a dope.

Or a tool.

Ok, let’s forget Ken Starr for the moment. What about appointing anyone actually worthy as special prosecutor?

Keller says appointing a special prosecutor would call the Republicans’ bluff.

I see it more as playing into their hands.

A special prosecutor’s investigation would give legal cover and sanction to the Republicans’ partisan witch hunts.

They could say and would say:

"See, it’s not just us. There’s a special prosecutor at work! There must be something dirty at the bottom of things or there wouldn’t be a special prosecutor, would there?"

And then the Media would help by covering the special prosecutor’s doings nonstop.

“See,” the Republicans could say again:

“It’s not just us. The liberal media is all over this. There must be something dirty at the bottom of things or they wouldn’t be going after their president like this.”

Even if at the end it worked out the way it did in 1998 and 1999, with the President’s approval ratings soaring and voters punishing Republicans at the polls, the damage will have been done. For as long as the investigation went on, the daily news out of Washington would be all about the various ways people had asked and answered the questions, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” that day.

And as long as it continued, the work of governing the country would grind to a halt as the only Party interested in governing the country would be spending all its time defending the President. And as long as it continued, whatever good the President managed to accomplish along the way would fail to make the news.

Barely does now.

A hobbled and defensive President Obama is just what the Republicans have wanted for the last five years.

So what was Keller thinking?

The probable answer to that is, He wasn't thinking at all. He had what struck him as a clever idea and hurried it into print to show off his clerveness. But if he did give it any actual thought, he didn't mean for readers to catch on, and I have a guess as to what it was he thought.

You knew I would, right?

Here it is, my guess.

I’m guessing he thought:

Gee, what fun it would be to have a big scandal to cover! And here’s our chance to get one. But we’d better get it going or we’re going to lose that chance. The Republicans already seem to be blowing it and Obama has a way of surviving and thriving. An investigation by a special prosecutor might be just the ticket to reviving the story!

I’m pretty sure that when DC insiders talk about the blowout of BP’s oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico when they get together, they say things like:

"Wasn’t that supposed to be Obama’s Katrina? What went wrong?"

And it’s clear from what they’ve written and yammered on the bobblehead shows that they’ve been watching Benghazi, the IRS mess, and the AP spy game and thinking:

Hmm, maybe this time we’ll get lucky, maybe this one’s the real McCoy, maybe this one is his Watergate or his Monica. Here’s hoping.

Keller’s rooting for the IRS mess. You can hear his inner cheerleader rah-rahing all the way through his argument that the IRS mess is the scandal that requires the return of Ken Starr.

Kenneth Starr.

Sheesh.

It’s not as if Kenneth Starr was the only special prosecutor ever appointed. If we really need one, why not an Archibald Cox, a Leon Jaworsky, a Lawrence Walsh, or a Patrick Fitzgerald?

Couldn’t be that those special prosecutors investigated Republican Presidents and that those scandals---Watergate, Iran-Contra, the blowing of Valerie Plame’s cover---all involved actual crimes and bringing their names up might remind people what real scandals look like.

Couldn’t be that talking up Kenneth Starr is a way of embarrassing Bill Clinton and Democrats while talking about the others might---or at any rate ought to---shame Republicans.

Flicker
swooped out from a tree by the roadside as I was driving along. Thought
he was aiming at my windshield, but he turned in plenty of time, flying
straight on ahead of me as though we’d planned to meet up and now he
was going to guide me on home.

Reviews are embargoed until next Thursday, so it’ll be a week before I can tell you what I thought of the play last night. I think I’m not violating any sacred oaths by saying I had a good time at the theater. Getting to the theater was not such a good time. Pain has a way of taking the fun out of things, and the four block walk from the parking garage was painful.

Four measly blocks. There was a time when I could take four blocks in a single stride. Last year, in fact. Oh well. After the first half block up East 13th I realized the only way I was going to cover the next three and a half was by gritting my teeth, bearing down, and taking it at a dead run. As close to an approximation of a dead run as an old man with a cane can manage.

I gritted my teeth. I bore down. I ran for it. And at the next corner I ran right into someone else coming my way along Sixth Avenue. Guy in his forties, although I didn’t get a good look at him right away. The collision spun us both around in our tracks.

Before either one of us had stopped spinning we were both apologizing profusely, so many excuse me’s and I’m sorry’s filling the air you’d have thought we were London instead of New York.

I steadied myself on my cane before lifting my eyes to his to continue an apology and saw…

What’s funny about Republicans’ touting their various ginned up “scandals” as “worse than Watergate and Iran Contra”---funny as in hypocritical assholes!---is that most of them don’t believe those crimes involved any wrongdoing on the parts of Presidents Nixon and Reagan and all their men. They still think Oliver North is a hero and that Reagan was right to try to fund the Contras and support the Death Squads. They still think Nixon was railroaded and he and his gang of crooks, bagmen, burglars, thugs, political saboteurs, extortionists, spies, goons, and at least one very enthusiastic would-be murderer and assassin were guilty of nothing but playing political hardball the same way as the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson played it.

“Watergate” and “Iran Contra” are just words to them, and to Right Wingers words have no real meaning they feel bound to respect. Words are only useful noises, valuable in how well they make sounds that express emotions they want to exploit at the moment. They use the words because know they rile people up and send the Press Corps into a tizzy.

Journalists and pundits who should know better are tossing around Nixon references and comparisons too. But it’s well established that while the members of the national press corps should know better, too many can’t be bothered to. They have little knowledge of history and almost no interest in it except when they can think of something they sort of vaguely remember from their college history class that seems to prove a point about the present moment, a point they are determined to make no matter the evidence, a point they will continue to make even after it’s shown to them by historians and people who were actually there that the historical evidence proves that point is garbage.

They like the Nixon references because they’re easy, they make them feel like their onto something big, and if they keep making them maybe they’ll turn out to be true and then they’ll get to cover a Big Story full of gossip and scandal, with winners and losers, revelations, accusations, colorful characters, and no boring stuff like policy.

But even some actually smart journalists and pundits and bloggers, who not only should know better but do know better, liberals even!, have been happily conjuring the ghost of Tricky Dick.

I have no idea what’s got into them or what they think they’re thinking. They aren’t really thinking about Nixon and Watergate, that’s for sure. All I can figure is they’re trying to show that their political morality isn’t purely partisan and they are as ready to come down on President Obama as they were (or would have been had they been old enough) to come down on Nixon.

But using to Nixon and Watergate references to demonstrate how seriously they’re taking it all---the IRS mess, the spying on AP, which are things to take very seriously---they’re accidentally trivializing what Nixon did, reducing Watergate to some illegal wiretapping and auditing of a few political enemies’ taxes and the delivery of pizzas that were never ordered, apparently forgetting there was that little matter of a third rate burglary, definitely forgetting that Nixon’s men did more than spy on some journalists. They plotted the murder of one.

It’s been said a gazillion times since 1974 that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. A fatuous observation in that covering up a crime is a crime and it usually involves the committing of more crimes. But also in the case of Watergate, the cover-up and the crimes were inseparable. What’s more, the reason the cover-up brought Nixon down was that the crimes he committed to cover up his other crimes put him under the jurisdiction of Congress and the federal courts and they got at him first. If Gerald Ford hadn’t pardoned him, various law enforcement agencies would have had their turn and he’d have faced criminal charges in a criminal court where he’d have almost certainly been found guilty---he’d have been a convicted criminal, and then there’d be no confusion in the matter, except the confusion deliberately caused by Republicans trying to defend him and excuse what he did prefatory to accusing Democrats of having done worse.

“Watergate” is an umbrella name for a wide-ranging, years-long criminal enterprise run out of the White House by Richard Nixon.

The answer to the questions “What did the President know and when did he know it” are “Everything” and “Right from the start, because it was his idea. He started it and he directed it from beginning to end.”

Watergate was an expression of Nixon’s personality: Paranoid, riven by insecurity, driven by resentments, hatreds, angers, and fear, contemptuous of everyone who wasn’t Richard Nixon, jealous, envious, covetous, vain, far too confident in his own abilities and intelligence except when he wasn’t at all confident, paralyzed and undermined by fits of self-doubt and self-loathing, and finally self-destructive.

To call President Obama and what you think he might have done or are afraid he might have done or hope he might have done Nixonian is to say that Barack Obama is like Richard Nixon in temperament, personality, motivation, and desire.

I don’t see it.

Robert Kennedy Jr. has a very good memory of Watergate and an understanding of Nixon that comes from being the son and nephew of three men Richard Nixon hated---it can be argued that Watergate was all about getting Ted Kennedy. He’s written a detailed piece for OpEdNews laying it out, Obama and Nixon: A Historical Perspective.

______________________

Someone you’d think would know better, simply by virtue of having become famous for breaking the story, apparently doesn’t. But then Bob Woodward has spent the better part of the last forty years proving that it was all Carl Bernstein. At TPM:Bob Woodward Compares Benghazi to Watergate.

In Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, one-time farm kid, now hard-charging sales rep for a nine-billion dollar energy corporation, Steve Butler (Matt Damon) keeps trying to walk away from his small town past but finds himself walking right back into it. Part of his problem may be that he’s wearing heavy symbolism on his feet in the form of his grandfather’s hand-me-down boots which seem to know the way home.

Less so if you get annoyed at having your own liberal pieties repeated back at you as if in a sermon by a preacher whose attitude is “Betcha never thought of that before!”

But I am a Matt Damon fan and, as a regular traveler in the liberal blogosophere, I’m used to people telling me what I ought to think about things I already came to their same conclusions about a long time ago, thank you very much.

So I was able to shrug my way through the preachiness, a task made easier by the Matt Damon and co-star John Krasinski’s screenplay’s having a lot of the preaching done by Hal Holbrook, who is, after all, Hal Holbrook---Mark Twain, Abe Lincoln, Senator Hays Stowe, and the narrator from Our Town all rolled into one---and he can make the most fiery and brimstone-heavy sermon sound like good, practical, friendly advice, and sit back and enjoy Damon’s affable, easy-going but focused performance as Steve Butler, a sales rep for a natural gas company looking to lease farms in order to frack the hell out of the shale deposits underneath who comes to the small town of McKinley, Pennsylvania thinking the money he’s offering the folks who live there will be welcomed as manna from heaven only to begin to suspect that he’s the working for the devil out to buy the town’s collective soul.

That little bit of plot synopsis might have reminded you of Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s totally un-preachy gem about a junior executive at American oil company sent to Scotland to negotiate the purchase of entire town where he comes to suspect, not that he’s out to buy the town’s collective soul but that he has one himself, a soul, that is. And I can see how it would be tempting to compare the two movies. In fact, I’ve seen other reviewers and commenters give into the temptation. I’m tempted myself and I am going to give into it, a little. But in an important way it’s unfair.

Local Hero is a comedy and one with a sharp satirical edge. Promised Land is full of humor, people say funny things and funny things happen, mainly to Matt Damon, but it’s in the vein of “Life isn’t all sorrow and pain and at least we’ve got that to laugh about.” It’s an earnest drama with something to say working its deliberate and wistful way toward an ending that won’t be unambiguously happy but will be full of meaning.

But there’s a way Promised Land could have and should have been more like Local Hero. Forsyth gave the village of Ferness an identity of its own. It’s a particular place inhabited by particular---and peculiar---people, who, even if we don’t get to know them intimately, we can see are busy with lives going on outside the confines of the plot.

Think of the anonymous motorcyclist roaring angrily up and down the narrow streets at all hours. Think of the men on the beach watching the old fisherman painting and then painting out new names on his boat and of the baby with them who seems to belong to all of them and none of them. Think of the faces we glimpse and the conversations we catch snatches of as the camera hops from table to table at the hooley. All clues to lives lived, privately and communally, that taken together give Ferness its peculiar and particular character.

McKinley is generic small town America. We meet only a few individuals and local eccentrics appear to have been banned by a town ordinance. Characters represent interests but not themselves. Steve assumes things about the town's economic situation but we have only his word and our own preconceptions to confirm it. Nobody in town seems to know their own business or their neighbors'. They don't get to tell us in what ways they're hurting or thriving. Nobody talks as if they have lives apart from the plot. Holbrook's character, Frank Yates, is a retired engineer teaching high school science and raising miniature horses but he never gives any of his past and present occupations a thought. Rob (Titus Welliver), the sly-eyed, soft-spoken charmer who runs the general store, Rob’s Gund, Groceries, Guitars, and Guitars, seems curiously detached not just from the town but from his own place of business, as if he seems to be minding the store as a favor to the real owner he expects will be back shortly.

The look, the sounds, and the feel of the town are authentic. We get to know what it's like to stand inside Rob’s but not what it's like to shop there, to have gone in for a loaf of bread and find yourself waiting in line behind people you know buying and paying too much for a week's worth of groceries because they don't have time to make the trip to a larger town with a real supermarket or don't have the money for the gas or to get the truck fixed, stand there and make small talk about the weather while they count out change and decide which items to put pack so they can afford a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket or a treat for the kids. Promised Land is supposed to be about people for whom money is a constant worry but it doesn't capture what it's like to live poor. Not necessarily to be poor but to continually not have cash on hand when you need it.

But Rob's appears to have only two regular customers, Steve and his sales partner Sue (Frances McDormand). Things are busier down the road at Buddy's Place, the town watering hole, but while we can feel what it'd be like to sit there at the bar with a drink, there's little sense of who we'd be drinking with, unless, like Steve, we're lucky enough to attract the attention of a pretty and slightly tipsy local grade school teacher. Something similar goes on at the diner where we can practically smell the coffee but can't hear any of the gossip being shared at the counter. It's not as though the people fade into the woodwork. It's more that the camera takes them in with the same interest as it takes in the woodwork. Director Gus Van Sant and his cinematographer love to photograph people in groups, but they rarely pick out individuals and move in for close-ups of their faces.

And this is how Promised Land gets preachy, by replacing individuals with examples. The young mother worried about her child’s future education. The crooked small town politician who sees opportunity to make a fast back off his constituents’ grief. The upright farmer making the case for things in life worth more than money. The shiftless goober instantly spoiled by just the promise of the comparatively little money Steve’s offered him. And, as if they don’t believe we’ll get the point, Damon and Krasinski and Van Sant take us to church for a succession of sermons.

The preaching isn't against fracking, although it's a given that fracking is an ongoing ecological disaster. And it isn't against the evils of corporate capitalism, although it's another given that the corporation Steve works for, Global Crossover Solutions, is greedy, irresponsible, conscience-less, corrupt and corrupting because, after all, it’s a corporation, and if corporations are people, my friend, they are not nice people.

But, like I said, these are givens and Damon and Krasinski and Van Sant don’t spend a lot of time in their pulpits railing against them.

The preaching is in favor of a Frank Capra-esque ideal of small town America.

There's a conservative streak in American liberalism, just as there's a progressive streak in conservatism---the fast fading, old-fashioned brand, not the Right Wing reactionaryism that calls itself conservative---that's brought out by every debate over paving paradise and putting up a parking lot.

In such cases, the conservative argument points out the progressive nature of development, how it will bring in not just money, but jobs and opportunity, how it will increase the tax base, giving localities the means to improve their schools and their infrastructure. Meanwhile, you get liberals arguing for leaving things as they are or even putting them back to the way they were in order to protect and preserve the community and communitarian values, to keep out temptations and pressures to live lives devoted to getting and spending and acquiring wasteful and unnecessary toys and gizmos. You even find liberals championing that supposedly most conservative of values, self-reliance---after all, people can become as dependent upon corporate-created wealth as upon government aid.

While Promised Land respects the conservative progressive argument and even grants the point, it comes down squarely on the liberal conservative side. But because we don’t get to know McKinley as a place where people live out this ideal and as a place worth saving for itself, as opposed to on general principle, because no characters represent it in its particularity and peculiarity, the town doesn’t speak for itself and so must be spoken for. And this is a job left mainly to Frank in his homely homilies, to Krasniki's character, an environmental activist who, being an outsider, is in the position of telling people in town what they should think and do, that is, he's a professional preacher, and to, of all people, Steve, who keeps bringing up counter-arguments to his own sales pitch as part of that pitch.

Now here’s what I found most likeable about Promised Land: Matt Damon’s portrait of a well-meaning man divided against himself.

Steve grew up in Iowa, working on his grandfather's farm in a town a lot like---he'd say exactly like---McKinley. But his hometown's economy collapsed when he was in high school, and he watched neighbors and family lose their farms and their homes. A frightened and heartbroken Steve got the hell out and he’s never looked back---because he’s always looking ahead at his past looming up in front of him as he arrives in the next small town that’s his hometown all over again. He’s chosen a job that has him constantly repeating the crisis of his youth. On behalf of Global Crossover Solutions, he visits town after town facing the same threat of collapse and ruin as he saw happen back in Iowa, offering…solutions. He’s proud to be bringing in the money and industry that will give people lifeboats to climb into as their old way of life sinks beneath their feet. As he leaves a place, having closed deals that have left many people rich, he can tell himself that he’s saved the day again. Then he arrives in the next town where he meets with the same challenges all over again, the same problems, the same sort of people with the same troubles meeting him with the same (what he sees as willful) blindness to hard economic realities, the same stubborn resistance to his sales pitches. He has to make the same arguments all over again, only this time, in McKinley, he has begun to sense that his main argument is with himself. It’s becoming clear that he’s his own main customer and toughest sell.

Damon starts Steve off smooth-talking, witty, amiable, but with a gaze that keeps wandering, as if he’s suddenly sensing someone walking up from behind him to tap him on the shoulder, and tell him, Enough of this nonsense, let’s get out of here, we’ve got better things to do. As the movie goes along, his focus turns inward, his witticisms develop an edge, his amiability gives way to irritability, and more and more he seems to be listening only to himself and not liking what he hears.

At a certain point Damon lets us see that Steve’s mouth is running several beats ahead of his thoughts. He’s thinking about what he’s saying after he’s said it and he can’t believe anybody would spout such nonsense and expect any sane or sensible person to buy it.

Steve tells himself and whoever he thinks is listening that his coming from where he does allows him to sympathize with the folks he's negotiating with, and it does, but it also gives him the knowledge he needs to manipulate them. He's a salesman and he sells by exploiting fears and offering to make dreams come true.

But Steve has been subtly sabotaging himself from the start. The movie opens with him being offered a big promotion, with his bosses giving him a glimpse of the corporate promised land, and it shakes him down to his boots, which, as it happens, in a bit of heavy-handed or I should say heavy-footed symbolism, are his grandfather’s old workboots. He’s not having a crisis of conscience. He doesn’t appear to have any moral or ethical qualms about his work and what he’s done to earn the promotion or any serious objection to the culture of the home office suits he’ll be joining, even though they’re shown to be slightly ridiculous. The new job will bring him in off the road, which ought to be a relief. But it will also root him in the city. And that will put an end to his search.

All along, it appears, a part of Steve has kept him on the move. That’s the part of him that’s still trying to escape his hometown. But the reason he’s still trying to escape is that another part of him has been looking for something in every town he’s “closed.” Home and a reason to stay put.

Steve’s sales partner, Sue Thomason, has no divided interests. She’s unapologetic about what she’s doing---her job. In fact, that’s her refrain. “It’s just a job.” And she’s not granting herself absolution with it. Her conscience is clear. A job is what a decent person does to provide for herself and her family and to better their lot in life. A job is an opportunity to do yourself good. This is what she sells on behalf of Global Crossover Solutions, the opportunity to make your life better. If improving your chances in life means getting the hell out, you get the hell out. The important thing, though, is that it’s up to you what you make of the opportunity the money from Global provides.

Sue has no sentimental notions about McKinley or any other town she’s visited or will visit. Every place is the same to her, just a stop along the way. Unlike Steve, she doesn’t see herself as saving anybody or anything except herself, and, although she likes and admires Steve, she regards his savior complex as an indulgence, and a weakness, and, ultimately, a threat to her.

Her affection for Steve never wavers but her respect for him does, and we can see her point, because, as Sue, Frances McDormand manages to make cynical pragmatism and an almost conscience-less self-interest virtues. Or at least the forgivable side-effects of a virtue, one she practices without getting preachy about it, self-reliance.

This doesn’t mean Sue is without temptations to indulgences of her own, and one comes at her in McKinley in the form a sweet, mild, and humor-filled flirtation with Rob of Rob’s Guns, Groceries, Guitars and Gas, who manages to find and bring out the small town girl in the big city businesswoman.

McDormand and Welliver make a good team. So do McDormand and Damon. Their relationship is teasing, playful, full of the knowledge and habits and sympathies built up over too many miles logged after too many days on the road together, with Sue as the amusedly critical older sister to Steve’s over-achieving and a little too full of himself kid brother.

As for the rest of the cast: Holbrook is Holbrook. As Alice, the schoolteacher who catches Steve’s eye, Rosemarie DeWitt mostly has to make us believe she’s a good reason for Steve to suddenly start thinking about staying put at last, which she does through her wit, her intelligence, and her warmth. Scoot McNairy turns up as the upright farmer making the case for the things in life worth more than money, although for the life of me I couldn’t have told you it was him when he first appeared. After seeing him as the Doubting Thomas of the group of diplomats in hiding in Argo, the whiny-voiced thief in Killing Them Softly, and now in Promised Land, I’m thinking he’s on his way to becoming one of the great movie chameleons of our time. Tim Guinee has a heartbreaking cameo as one of the few residents of McKinley we get to know as something more than an example of a point Promised Land is making. Van Sant holds on his face as Guinee shows us the absolute terror of a man receiving news that seems to him too good to be true at the same time he realizes that his whole world is about to be turned upside down. And as the environmental activist who seems to have Steve’s number, because, essentially, he's Steve’s double, John Krasinski has the engaging and persuasive confidence of a man who knows he has right on his side and an ace up his sleeve.

Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, screenplay by Matt Damon and John Krasinski, starring Matt Damon, Frances McDormand, Hal Holbrook, John Krasinski, and Rosemary DeWitt. Now out on DVD and available to watch instantly at Amazon.

“We were a peace movement, for Crissake!” Jim Grant, a former 60s radical back on the run from the FBI after decades underground, turns for help to his rival, antagonist, and friend from his college days, Professor Jed Lewis, a one-upon-a-time campus activist now a celebrity academic who wants nothing to do with him or their shared past in The Company You Keep, directed by Robert Redford with Redford as Grant and Richard Jenkins as Lewis leading an ensemble of great character actors and stars playing against type in a group portrait of people bound together by a decades-old crime.

Early in Robert Redford’s often thrilling but not all that political political thriller, The Company You Keep, Susan Sarandon, as a once-upon-a-time 60s radical recently arrested after thirty-odd years underground, tries to explain herself to a hotshot young newspaper reporter come to interview her in jail. She begins her attempt to make him understand why she did what she did all those years ago and why she’s done what she’s now done by asking him if he has children. The reporter, Ben Shepard (played by Shia LaBeouf), grins a calculatedly charming self-deprecating grin you know he’s applied to have patented and is working on bottling for sale. “I barely have furniture,” he says.

It's a revealing line. Not so much of his character. For Shepard it's just a reflexive joke. It doesn't mean much. He's caught up in the fun and excitement of being a hotshot young reporter. He's not given any real thought to marriage, family, or his future beyond the next big scoop, and he's not about to start thinking about any of that now, not while he's in the middle of chasing this scoop, at any rate. But one of the themes of The Company You Keep is that having children makes conservatives of us all. This being a movie directed by Robert Redford, conservative means law-abiding, job-holding, tax-paying decent-minded, do-gooding liberals working within the system to make it better as opposed to radicals and revolutionaries working to destroy it from outside.

Sarandon plays Sharon Solarz, a now wife and mother of two college-aged children who as a die-hard member of the Weathermen more than a generation ago took part in a bank robbery during which a security guard was shot and killed. The FBI has been looking for her and her accomplices for decades. One of those accomplices, the actual shooter, is long dead. Another, the gang’s leader of the moment, Mimi Lurie, has gone so deep underground that none of her former friends in Weather know where to even begin to look for her. But the third, Nick Sloan, Mimi’s lover at the time, has been hiding in plain sight, living as a lawyer named Jim Grant near Albany, New York, and in the course of investigating Solarz’ story, Shepard stumbles on a connection between her and Grant and it doesn’t take him long to figure out that that connection is something more than that of lawyer to potential client. And it doesn’t take Grant long to figure out that Shepard has him figured out. Sloan has been so successful at building a new identity for himself---one that besides a semi-public law career includes a late-in-life family. His wife has recently died, leaving him the sixty-something single father of a still grieving and emotionally fragile eleven year old daughter---that he no longer thinks of himself as Sloan.

But there’s something else he’s never thought of himself as.

Guilty.

He wasn’t in on the robbery. That day Mimi had borrowed his car for the getaway and when the police found it after she’d abandoned of course they found Sloan’s fingerprints all over it and assumed he was the getaway driver. But not only was he not there, by that time, Sloan had already distanced himself politically and morally from the Weathermen. The only reason he was still in the picture at all was Mimi. He was hanging around out of love for her and for the sake of the someone else.

But even though Grant doesn’t think of himself as Nick Sloan, he has never stopped thinking of himself as a fugitive who might have to go back on the run at any moment. He has always had plans for escape and when he realizes Shepard is about to expose him, he puts one of those plans into motion. His intention, however, isn’t to disappear. It’s to finally clear his name so he can keep his life as Jim Grant, not just for his own sake but the sake of his daughter who he knows isn’t up to losing a second parent in the course of a year.

Grant, then, is on a rescue mission to save his daughter. He’s running to chase down the one person who can vouch for his innocence, and while he’s chasing Mimi, Shepard, chasing his big scoop, chases after him.

The politics and history of the 1960s and 70s are important to the backgrounds of the main characters, but they’re not important to the movie. It’s a given that the war in Vietnam was immoral but also as a given that the Weathermen’s efforts to “bring the War home” were inexcusable and a betrayal of the anti-war movement’s principles. As one of Grant’s rivals for campus leadership and Mimi’s affections back in the day (Richard Jenkins in a brilliant cameo) exasperatedly reminds him, “We were a peace movement, for Crissake!” But The Company You Keep spends little time rehashing those old debates. Politics is the Maguffin, the excuse for the chase. The Company You Keep is a chase movie, and a pretty exciting chase movie at that. In parts it’s as exciting as The Fugitive and Redford's own Three Days of the Condorand Spy Game.

But the chase is itself a Maguffin, the excuse to paint serial portraits of people haunted individual and particular ways by their part in a crime. That the crime had a political nature only matters in that it lets them and us avoid thinking of Grant and Mimi and Solarz and their old friends and associates as run of the mill criminals and murderers. The Company You Keep is about the company they kept and, out of love, loyalty, and complicity, still keep despite the distances of time and space that appear to have separated them.

As Grant/Sloan, Robert Redford is at the center of the film, but as director the main job he’s given himself as actor is to lead the camera into scenes with his many co-stars and hold it there while they deliver the real goods. Redford mostly just has to convince us he’s thinking his way through the problem of being on the run again and that he’s smart enough to stay one step ahead of Shepard and two steps ahead of the FBI.

Playing smart has always been one of his Redford’s strengths.

Back in the day, people thought Redford was unconvincing as Bob Woodward because he was too handsome to be a newspaper reporter. All these years later, now that we know Woodward better, Will Ferrell's performance as Woodward in Dick seems more true to life than Redford's in All the President's Men. Redford is unconvincing because he seems too smart.

Redford has often seemed too smart for the characters he's played. He has infused characters, who played by other actors wouldn't have been as smart, might even have been dumb, with a surprising and complicating intelligence making them not so much too smart for their own good but smart to their own perplexing. They know enough to know they should know more and suspect they would be happier knowing less. Sundance, Jay Gatsby, Hubbell Gardner. Even Bill McKay.

That intelligence is a problem here. It's not that the likes of Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayers weren't smart. They were very smart. But they were also dumb in the way very smart people can be dumb, especially very smart young people who are also vain, egotistical, careless, and full of self-righteous purpose. They could persuade themselves that they were always smart, smart about everything, and therefore any idea they had must be a good idea. Smart as he can play it, Redford doesn’t come across as smart enough in that way to have been dumb enough in that way. But there's another, offsetting quality to Redford's screen persona, a degree of passivity. Many of his characters are temperamentally drifters, carried along by whatever current they've happened to fall into until taken into tow by more active and driven personalities.

“I'll change.”

“No, don't change. You're your own girl, you have your own style.”

“But then I won't have you. Why can't I have you?”

“Because you push too hard, every damn minute. There's no time to ever relax and enjoy living. Every things too serious to be so serious.”

“If I push too hard it's because I want things to be better, I want us to be better, I want you to be better. Sure I make waves you have I mean you have to. And I'll keep making them till you’re everything you should be and will be. You'll never find anyone as good for you as I am, to believe in you as much as I do or to love you as much.”

__________

"You know what you are, Paul? You're a watcher. There are watchers in this world and there are doers. And the watchers sit around watching the doers, do. Well, tonight you watched, and I did. "

"Well, it was a lot harder watching what you did than it was for you to do what I was watching!"

___________

"You keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at."

"I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals."

Something to keep in mind when picturing his Gatsby standing at the edge of his lawn and feeling the pull of the green light the end of Daisy's dock.

Maybe I'd have felt there was if Mimi had been played by someone else. Mimi is supposed to be the one still carrying the flame, the one who has not, at least in her own mind, made concessions to time, age, or history. And I can think of two of Redford's former leading ladies who’d have fit the bill perfectly.

Jane Fonda.

Barbara Streisand.

The late Nathalie Wood would have been ideal. But, now, since she was already on hand, Susan Sarandon would have been fine in the part. (Sarandon was never one of his leading ladies but she was a minor love interest. Quick. Without checking Imdb. Name the movie.) Instead it's Julie Christie playing what is more or less the femme fatale from Grant's and the other old men's shared past, and as wonderful as it always is to see Christie on screen, she's just too cool and aloof for a former planter of bombs and robber of banks and current smuggler of pot still breaking the law in the name of the Revolution.

Redford himself almost saves the day here. We might not quite believe Christie’s Mimi was ever the force of nature who made smart men stupid enough to rob banks and plant bombs with her, but Redford makes us believe his Grant is the type of romantic who would do almost anything for the women he loves. (Something else to think about when thinking about his Gatsby.) Anything but something really, really stupid, which, as it turns out, is to the point.

All this, though, is by way of an aside to talking about the Redford who really matters to The Company You Keep. Redford the director.

Somebody somewhere must have done a study of the influences on Redford’s work as a director of the directors he’s acted for, including George Roy Hill, Sydney Pollack, Alan Pakula, and Lasse Hallstrom, all of whose lessons pop up throughout The Company You Keep. But I think just as important to Redford’s directing style is his time spent as an aspiring painter. Before he turned to acting, Redford studied at the Pratt Institute of Art and lived the artist’s life in Paris, and it’s a painter’s eye that guides his camera. I don’t mean he thinks in terms of pretty pictures. I mean he works in illustrations. His films are series of still lifes, landscapes, street scenes, single and small group portraits, and genre paintings. He creates people-scapes. He knows how to see his way through a crowd. Large groups of people aren’t masses in motion for him, they are forms arranged around what we need to find or follow.

Movies are stories told in pictures. Redford likes to tell stories within pictures.

There’s a shot of Sarandon in profile that perfectly translates into an image a line from the Neil Gordon novel the movie is based on---“Sharon Solarz, in person, was a handsome woman with thick black hair and a face that had aged hard, bringing out a certain pugnacity that would not, in my opinion, sit well with a jury.”---and a single shot of Redford and Richard Jenkins as a former student radical turned celebrity academic sitting on a bench in an art gallery tells us the whole story of these characters’ past rivalry, current animosity, and permanent bond of sympathy, loyalty, and respect. And something similar is at work when LaBeouf’s reporter confronts Brendan Gleeson as a former FBI agent strangely indifferent to the solution of a case he began his career investigating. He looms over LaBeouf like a wall of integrity, honesty, and secrecy Shepard can’t climb, break through, or get around, the only motion on Gleeson’s part the potential motion of his character’s picking up the reporter and tossing him off the dock they’re standing on.

Often there’s not a lot of movement in a single shot but there’ll still be a lot going on. Redford creates tension through juxtapositions of shapes and shadows and he can imply an awful lot of motion simply by a small disturbance in the stillness: The distant, solitary figure of Joe Mondragon scrambling up a dusty hill in The Milagro Beanfield War. The flick of Paul’s wrist and then the curling through space of his fly and line in A River Runs Through It. A finger pinning down the corner of a newspaper and then slowly dragging it across a countertop in The Company You Keep.

As an actor Redford has always had a good ear and an excellent sense of timing, and he brings both to his work as a director. And he has a knack for putting together ensembles of great character actors and stars cast against type. Besides Sarandon, Christie, Jenkins, and Gleeson, The Company You Keep features features finely tuned, low-key performances by Terrence Howard as the implacable FBI agent chasing Grant, Stanley Tucci as Shepard's tough-talking but easily talked over and around editor, Chris Cooper as Grant 's doctor brother manipulated into having to make the sort of choice between what's lawful and what's right he avoided having to make back when he and his brother were in college and Grant's radicalism was tearing their family apart, and Stephen Root as a former pot farmer turned organic grocer who can 't seem to believe his current business is legal any more than he could believe his former one was illegal.

My favorite, though, and possibly for sentimental reasons, is Nick Nolte as Grant's best friend from college who, even though they haven't seen each other in decades, is still cheerfully loyal and happily willing to risk everything to help his old friend in whatever way he can.

I got a special kick out of seeing Nolte and Redford together because I've always believed Nolte's career took off when some producer said, Get me a Redford type only one who looks like he'd be a little slower on the uptake and quicker to reach for a drink or a joint or to throw a punch.

The two have a nearly wordless scene together in a diner that sums up the dynamic of their characters' friendship and made me look forward to their upcoming pairing in the adaptation of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woodswhich I'd been mildly dreading.

But for me the most remarkable and surprising performance is LaBeouf's. I'd given up expecting him to follow through on the promise he showed inThe Greatest Game Ever Played. This is the most relaxed I've seen him on screen since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In everything that's followed he's looked tense and headachy as if trying desperately to hear himself think through the din of The Transformers movies still pounding in his ears. But here it's as if the noise has finally faded and, able to concentrate again at last, he's not only remembered how to act but how acting can be fun.

It's also as if Redford has reminded him that there are other ways to be a leading man besides trying to be Harrison Ford Jr or, for that matter, a darker Robert Redford. Or, rather, that the way to be like Ford or Redford is to not take himself too seriously.

LaBeouf is clearly having a good time playing Shepard as one of those annoyingly self-infatuated young men who enter every conversation convinced it won't be very long before you start finding them as charming as they find themselves. These types are even more annoying when it turns out they're right. Shepard isn't half as adorable as he thinks you'll think he is, but he's adorable enough that a shy smile, a deliberately clumsy witticism, a widening of his big Bambi eyes will usually cause a source to open up, a boss to surrender, an old girlfriend to forgive and forget, and a potential new girlfriend to become very curious about what she'll be expected to forgive and forget.

It’s not surprising that he’s come to think of journalism as a contest between himself and a source, that good reporting is a matter of turning up the charm, and that point of getting a story is the he got it.

LaBeouf's Shepard comes across as heartless and careless, thanks, apparently, to an excess of vanity, ego, and ambition. And he is vain, egotistical, and ambitious. But so are most talented twentysomethings enjoying the fruits of early success. Shepard's real problem is that he has never had reason to question what he does professionally. As far as he knows, just being good at his job makes him one of the good guys. (Maybe it's an idea he picked up from movies like All the President's Men.) Very few stories come a reporter's way that will, if reported honestly and fully, ruin innocent people's lives. By the time the reporter gets there with an open notebook, those lives have already been ruined. The cars have crashed, the houses have burned, the shots have been fired, the bodies have fallen, and the cops have moved in.

Shepard is about to learn that there are other kinds of stories---and more to every kind of story---that can't be told honestly and fully in a newspaper. Reporters who learn that lesson too well quit and become David Simon.

The Company You Keep is Jim Grant’s advernture, but it’s Ben Shepard’s story in that, this time, getting the story means getting the point, at last.

________________________

For one of Redford’s best peoplescapes, see the scene in The Conspirator in which Lincoln’s body is carried out of Ford’s Theatre and through the crowd to the house where he will lie on what will be his deathbed. Here’s my review of that one.

And here’s my review of The Guard, an Irish comic thriller that stars Brendan Gleeson as a very different sort of lawman than he plays in The Company You Keep.